


Synchronicity

by soundingsea



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/F, Female Protagonist, Geeky, Pre-Femslash, unix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-10
Updated: 2007-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-06 05:20:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundingsea/pseuds/soundingsea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mac tries to sync her internal clock with Veronica's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Synchronicity

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers: "Show Me the Monkey" (3x10)  
> Thanks: spiralleds for beta-reading. Any mistakes are mine.

Mac yawned and typed **date**. Helpfully, her computer informed her that it was now Wed Jan 24 20:03:19 PST 2007. Stupid UNIX commands. No good advice, just bitter irony. Things with Bronson had gotten awkward fast and dull faster. Nope, she didn't need any kind of date. She had a perfectly good clock on her toolbar and way more homework than was compatible with a social life.

But old habits died hard, and a nice little rhythm of date, up arrow, return would be just like watching the seconds tick down. She wished she could leave early, but no. The helpdesk was open until 21:00, and chances were super that there would be at least one frantic "I can't print" email or something before she closed up for the night. Until then, she had only the company of her own depressing thoughts.

She remembered a relevant command for those seeking advice (not counting Meta-x doctor, and she didn't, because Emacs was an annoying kitchen sink of an editor). This? This was old-school.
    
    
    mac@galactica$ fortune  
    A city is a large community where people are lonesome together  
                    -- Herbert Prochnow  
    mac@galactica$

 

Great. Mr. Toastmaster himself. Was anything more boring? Wait, she knew this one! Mealy-mouthed activist boys. Boring and single-minded and not at all--

"Hiya, Mac-attack." Veronica popped into view. Mac hadn't even heard her coming. "Almost done here?"

"Less than an hour left. I already made my printer rounds, and I'm all caught up on the request system."

"'Kay." Veronica dropped her bag on the floor and sat cross-legged on the opposite desk, looking expectantly at Mac.

Mac reached behind her desk and pulled out a cable, tossing the end to Veronica. "You'd think they'd stick a wireless access point down here, but no," Mac said. "No love for the sub-basement."

"Good thing you work here." Veronica inserted the cable and flipped her laptop open. "Somehow I doubt this would work otherwise."

"Hee. I have port security thinking that your mac is that printer. Yay for spoofed MACs."

"So many Macs, but I know which one's my favorite." Veronica batted her eyelashes.

Mac grinned. "If I had to guess, I'd say the one who's about to do you a favor."

Veronica looked like she was trying to make up her mind about something, and then smiled. "Okay, this is strictly confidential intel."

"I'll encrypt it and throw away the passphrase."

"I need to find out who downloaded my Perfect Murder paper from the Hearst WebClassroom."

"Okay, people need their Hearst X.500 to get in there." Off Veronica's blank look, Mac clarified, "Their campus email password. That means that it should be pretty easy to get the list once I'm on the WebCT server."

"And since you work here, ta-da!"

"Heh. Yeah, you think they give student workers root on the system with grades and assignments? This, I gotta earn."

Veronica pouted and looked adorable as Mac went down the list of possibilities. No luck on ssh keys, but that was a long shot. She couldn't make herself a UID 0 account in that LDAP tree, she certainly couldn't dist out new sudoers... but this nifty little remote root exploit in openSSL was too tasty to pass up. Much like certain girl detectives. Ahem.

"Here you go," Mac said. "I'll just scp these logs off to safety, and it's like we were never here. I'll run an analyzer against them tonight and crosscheck the logins against the X.500 directory; you'll have a list of names and campus addresses by morning."

"How can I ever repay you?" Veronica murmured melodramatically.

Mac swallowed, searching Veronica's face, and then was saved by the appearance of a user: an attractive woman with long dark hair, wearing a costumey-looking lab coat and a scowl.

"Last week's data run results are corrupt on my local system," the user said without preamble. "I need a restore from a backup last Thursday night." The girl paused and looked critically at Veronica. "Are you _everywhere_?"

Veronica looked guilty. "Hi, Penny. How's the research?"

"Terrible, if I don't get those results back tonight," Penny replied. "So unless you want to accuse me of something--"

"Whoa, okay," Mac said. "One restore, coming right up. Write down your username and the full path to the files in question, okay? I'll drop you an email when I'm done."

After scrawling the info on a post-it, the pretty Asian girl flounced out.

Mac raised an eyebrow at Veronica. "Making friends in the biosciences, I see."

"You know me. I'm all about the research," Veronica joked. "No, she was next door to those monkey people."

"Ah, right. Victim of the third degree. Well, let's go stick the right tape in."

Mac and Veronica crossed the hall to the machine room, Mac fumbling for the right key. Why did being around Veronica make her so nervous?

"Mac?"

Mac jumped. "Hmm?"

Veronica peered at a large glass-encased computer. "Why does this computer have Christmas lights blinking behind the cover?"

"Nothing gets by you," Mac said with admiration. "Okay, so I like to impress users with the blinkenlights. Harmless fakery."

Mac sorted through a stack of 40G DLTs. So not state of the art, but this was academia. And not the spend-your-grant-money-on-robotic-arms part, but the keep-the-webserver-running-on-an-etch-a-sketch part. More's the pity; a robotic tape drive would be handy about now.

"Damn. She's with the biosciences group, and I don't have access to the room with their tapes."

Veronica shrugged. "So she waits until tomorrow."

"Eh, I should try to get her those files tonight," Mac said, "if possible. Too bad we can't walk through walls, because it's right next door."

"Show me," Veronica said.

Mac took her out and around in the hallway, showed her the access card reader, and verified that Mac's card didn't work before they looked in the window that was set in the door.

Veronica ducked down and peered around. "Does that ceiling look lower to you?

Mac checked out Veronica and only then the ceiling in the locked room. "Yeah. Never noticed before, but it's definitely lower. Look, the cabinets almost come up to the top."

"What's up there?"

"Hmm, pipes, I guess. Exhaust, ductwork... this was designed as wet lab space. Hey, you just gave me an idea!" Mac rushed them back into the machine room and pointed out a tiny, half-height door. "Check it out. Network closet!"

Veronica tried the network closet door, but it didn't turn.

"I think I have a key," Mac said. She shuffled through a key ring and produced one. "Here, try this."

Veronica unlocked the door and they stepped in. Dusty and unpainted, the room featured a messy patch panel and a scary dumb terminal on a cart. And in the back, Mac saw a ladder just as Veronica stepped toward it.

"I wonder where this goes," Veronica said, scaling it effortlessly.

Mac followed her up to a high, narrow balcony. A grating stretched into the darkness in the right direction. "I could light the way with my phone, all Freebird style," Veronica joked.

Mac smiled an unseen smile. "Just let our eyes adjust."

She held the railing, her hand next to Veronica's. She became aware of Veronica's breathing, which was a totally normal thing to do when in a cramped space in the dark with a hot girl who... (Who was she kidding? Veronica didn't swing that way. Probably. Maybe.)

"Hey, light at 3 o'clock," Veronica said.

Mac looked. "Yep. Light." Intelligent commentary there. Way to go, Mac.

They edged forward to the bright edge of a ceiling grating and looked down.

"That's the Bio machine room, all right," Mac said. "Though it looks more like a museum."

"We can probably climb down on that lab bench," Veronica speculated.

"I'm a little taller," Mac said. "Let me by, and I'll drop down to that bench. You can steady me."

Mac sidled behind Veronica, brushing against her in a most intriguing way that made Mac's nipples pay attention. And that was not the kind of distraction she needed, dammit. She reached past the grating and lifted a section of lightweight false ceiling. Deep breath, hands on solid bars, Veronica's hands reassuringly at her wrists, swing down.

Mac hung for a dizzying moment and then released her grasp, landing heavily on the lab bench. She raised her arms for Veronica, and Veronica landed in them, giving Mac an illicit, if momentary, thrill before she set Veronica down. They slid off the high bench and onto the raised flooring.

"I gotta say, I think this place needs some Christmas lights," Veronica said, shaking her head in amusement.

"I don't think they would help," Mac said. "There ain't no cure for obsolete."

As if cabinets of reel-to-reel tapes weren't enough, the biosci machine room actually boasted a functional teletype. It chattered, logging error messages to a stack of fanfold paper. Frightening, but Mac couldn't look away.

"This the right tape drive?" Veronica asked. She picked up a tape labeled "Thursday".

"Mission impossible: accomplished," Mac agreed. She flipped the drive open and took out the tape marked "Wednesday", replacing it with Thursday's. "Now let me run start this restore." She tried out some eyelash-batting of her own.

"I'm guessing you want me to chill in here?" Veronica asked with a smile.

"Would make things easier, since Wednesday's tape has got to go back in tonight," Mac admitted.

Back in the helpdesk office, Mac made sure there were no other crises brewing and started pulling files off the tape, setting an auto-eject for when it finished. She'd hurry back and spend some interruption-free time with Veronica, which was possibly the best thing ever. No, make that definitely.

Before logging out, Mac noticed **date** still on her screen. Up arrow, return, and the zeros made her smile.
    
    
    mac@galactica$ date  
    Wed Jan 24 21:00:00 PST 2007  
    mac@galactica$  
    


End file.
